Education

In my freshman-year biology class in college, my professor asked the 120 students in the room to think about how a tree acquires mass as it grows. I was puzzled, having never been asked this question in previous biology classes, and other students felt the same way and didn't know the answer. After allowing us to deliberate for a little while, the professor proceeded to show us a video of Harvard and MIT graduates coming up with the wrong answer to this fundamental question about photosynthesis.

New learning standards are designed to keep up with the changing needs of new generations of schoolchildren. By that measure, New York University Professor Okhee Lee sees the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) as a success. 

Effective science education is, in itself, an innovation engine and more urgently needed now than ever before to address such major issues as climate change, national security, conservation of resources, disease epidemics and other health threats, trade, and more.  In President Obama's words, "... we know that the nation that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow. And I don't intend to have us out-educated" (Obama, 2009).

In September 2013, the 10th annual meeting of the Inter-American Network of Academies of Sciences (IANAS) was held in Santiago, Chile.

Recently the Professional Services Division at the SSEC sat down for the second of our new Journal Club meetings. Building off of our last discussion of the SSEC's "LASER" (Leadership and Assistance for Science Education Reform) model, we read Christopher L.

I'm sure we've all been asked, "How did you spend your summer vacation?" We usually describe the obligatory family trip, visits to the community pool with the kids or--if you're really creative and not averse to making things up--wolverine hunts in Alaska with your uncle (Napoleon Dynamite fans will understand).

Where does rain come from? Where do puddles go? How are plants and animals the same? How are they different? What makes objects go fast or slow? Helping young students answer these questions by encouraging their natural curiosity is a no-brainer for engaging them in science explorations. This is one of the goals of the newest set of science curriculum developed by the SSEC.

Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian scientist and educator in the 19th century who is often credited as the scientist that first published the Periodic Table of Elements. However, what people do not know is that he may have been one of the first scientists to use gamification to complete an educational task.

What drives a student's interest in STEM? Some people believe that these concepts come naturally to certain individuals, thinking that the "math gene" or the "science gene" gets bestowed on the lucky ones, like the tooth fairy leaving a quarter under their pillow. While this may have been believable at one time or another, now students have access to countless channels of information, STEM subjects are becoming a higher priority in classrooms, and learning is evolving into more of a fun activity.

"The focus of our training was to make us more comfortable with our general knowledge of science. Part of this is realizing that we don't need to have all the answers. What we do need to know is where to go to find them." --2013 SSEATs attendee

Suzanne Wilson's review article "Professional Development for Science Teachers" (Science, 2013) identifies the top five characteristics of effective professional development (PD) programs as: